A Mind @ Play

Dead Marshes

Continuing the Shadows of Mirkwood saga, The Dead Marshes adventure pack is the fifth in the cycle, and finds the heroes trying to corner and capture the creature Gollum in the treacherous mires, before he escapes for good. It has a difficulty rating of 5, putting it roughly in the middle of all of the scenarios thus far in the series.

For this adventure the developers have again devised a new mechanic: the escape test. At the start of the game, the Gollum card is placed in the staging area, and at various times (including the end of each round) the players are required to pass a test, similar to the standard questing: if they pass, nothing happens, should they fail, some tokens get placed on Gollum (and depending on situation, their threat level might rise). Enough tokens on Gollum, and he disappears into the deck.

Whilst this is thematically quite pleasing, the challenge being to prevent Gollum from escaping your clutches, there are enough of these tests in the game to make it fairly likely that Gollum will disappear. Which makes the rest of the game a potentially very long slog to try to find the card again, and doesn’t preclude the card appearing only to be discarded again (for example as a shadow card). In one of our games we managed to cycle through the full deck three or four times, and still didn’t get a chance to complete the mission before losing to a high threat value.

Some players consider this a thematically very fitting mechanic and far more exciting than the variations included in The Hills of Emyn Muil or even A Journey to Rhosgobel. Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky, but I found this scenario simply dull. There is only one new enemy in the set, although some of the larger ones from the core game reappear (Wilderlands encounter set), which at least give your characters something to do once you’ve lost Gollum. The expansion probably gets harder the more players are present, at least in as far as some of the Treachery cards require each player to perform an escape test, although this would also allow the deck to be cycled much quicker and might make losing Gollum less of a fiasco.

The player cards in this pack are similar to what we’ve come to expect from the previous ones. The hero here is Boromir for the Tactics sphere, whose dual abilities allow him to ready himself at any time for an increase in threat, as well as go down in a blaze of glory, dealing damage to all enemies engaging one player before being discarded. Definitely a worthwhile hero, with a second ability that is quite situational, but could at the same time be a life saver. Apart from that, Tactics gains another eagle ally, and their song card; the Spirit sphere gains two more Rohan related cards; Leadership features an ally with a one-off chance to negate shadow card effects, and another stat-enhancing attachment, this time giving a hero the ‘ranged’ attribute; Lore have a Silvan ally useful for questing, and a hobbit attachment, probably the weakest card in this set.

Overall, I found this to be the weakest adventure pack in the series, the solid player cards aside. Whilst I appreciate the new mechanic and enjoy the added variety, I felt that the scenario was very repetitive and potentially unbeatable should Gollum disappear, and this unduly dragging the game out to an eventual fizzle rather than an exciting climax. Of course, it may be possible to have a lucky turn of cards, but then the scenario would also likely finish in a few turns.

Hills of Emyn Muil

The Hills of Emyn Muil is the fourth adventure in the Shadows of Mirkwood series of adventure packs which expand The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game. The story pits the heroes exploring these barren and dangerous hills, avoiding pitfalls, and continuing their quest to track down the creature Gollum.

This expansion is unique in many ways. In terms of the number of players, it is probably more difficult, the more players are present, which is something of a rarity. The quest features only one card, and this requiring only one progress token to complete, with the adventure rather based around exploring locations and collecting a certain number of victory points. It has a difficulty rating of 4, putting it on a par with “Journey Down The Anduin” from the original set, and the first expansion The Hunt for Gollum. However, if players have been playing the adventure packs in sequence, with the extra cards they should much more easily be able to tailor their hands to suit the job in hand, and as such I found this quest much easier than “Journey Down The Anduin”, for example. Nevertheless, that alone can’t be used as criticism, and indeed the lighter difficulty comes as a pleasant refrain from the challenges of the previous adventures.

Still, the most common complaint about this adventure is that it is seemingly monotone. Depending on what sort of player you are, this scenario might feel extremely barren and uninteresting, but on the other hand if you managed to read The Lord of the Rings without skipping over the endless songs and descriptions of walking through the landscape, it might be far more up your alley. Despite being location-heavy, some of the larger enemies from the core set are present, as is a new enemy whose attack strength increases according to the number of locations present, and in particular there are some extremely exasperating Treachery cards to keep you on your toes and prevent this adventure being a walkover. Yet by way of design the adventure throws its ‘big guns’ at you in the opening volley, and if you survive the first few rounds you might find yourself having an army of allies standing around with little to do by the eventual end.

One of my biggest criticisms of the adventure packs thus far has focused on the player cards, which were often released in an entirely pointless order. By this stage, however, if you’ve been buying the packs in order, most of the cards start to come into their own, and the ones in this set offer a pretty good selection, including a few which are obviously useful to this scenario. The hero in this pack is “Brand, son of Bain”, a character similar in stats to Legolas, but whose ability is very coop oriented, a nice addition for people not playing the game solo. The Tactics sphere gets another pair of eagle cards, Spirit continues in a Rohan vein and gets their song card (resource generator), Lore has an extremely powerful ally, whilst Leadership gets… well, arguably the most useless card in the game so far. By and large though, the cards make excellent additions and can prove very useful for this scenario in particular.

As one of the easier expansions, it’s somehow a shame that this adventure wasn’t earlier on the list. Whilst some might find it dull, if it doesn’t bother you that the enemies are very sparse, it offers a nice break and a bit of variety, without being a complete walk in the woods. The design is a little flawed in that it tends to start off hard and gradually get easier, and the lack of any progression in the storyline leaves exploring the locations relatively monotonous, but these factors are arguably made up for by the usefulness of the included player cards.

A Journey to Rhosgobel

If you’re playing the Shadows of Mirkwood series of adventure packs in order, A Journey to Rhosgobel is the third stage, coming after the brutal Conflict at the Carrock. The story has our heroes encounter a wounded eagle, which needs taking to see Radagast at Rhosgobel to be treated with the medicinal herb Athelas before it is too late.

The second adventure pack to feature an ally in the enemy deck, A Journey to Rhosgobel revolves around the eagle character Wilyador, who unlike Grimbeorn from Conflict at the Carrock, joins the players immediately and swaps ownership each turn. With 20 hit points he certainly seems a tough cookie, but he also weakens at the end of every round, a nice mechanic which puts pressure on the players and forces them to attempt to complete the quest quickly, rather than hanging back and building up their forces. There are relatively few new enemies in this set, but a handful of dangerous Treachery cards which can have devastating effects.

This scenario is definitely a breath of fresh air, with a very specific mission which thematically fits rather nicely. Nevertheless it is still a bit of a mixed bag. The most common complaint is that this mission is, moreso than normal, extremely dependent on the luck of the draw. Healing Wilyador essentially relies on finding Athelas cards mixed in the enemy deck. Whilst there are a few locations which can help, the proportion of these cards is still very small. I haven’t played it solo, but I can imagine that only drawing one card from the deck would make it even more difficult. The scenario has a difficulty rating of 6, which puts it marginally easier than Dol Guldur and Conflict at the Carrock, but I would argue that the rating depends entirely on how the cards fall. A good shuffle, and you can find all the healing cards you need for Wilyador in the first few rounds; a bad shuffle, and he’ll die long before you find a single one, and there’s virtually nothing you can do about it.

In terms of the player cards, this set offers a fairly decent selection. The hero in this pack is Prince Imharil (Leadership), a character very similar to Aragon both in terms of stats and ability, and overall a useful alternative, if perhaps fairly bland. There’s no song in this pack, rather a neutral ally, Radagast, who collects his own resources which can be spent on bringing creature allies into the game, or healing ones already there. If you’ve been playing these adventures in sequence, there are also a few more cards here which will make some of the earlier inclusions more useful, such as the two cards which allow you to look through the top X cards in your deck for an eagle or Rohan card from The Hunt for Gollum adventure pack.

Overall this is a decent expansion pack, which adds some useful cards to the player decks, and offers a unique adventure with some nice mechanics that add tension, and force the players to consider their moves carefully. Unfortunately, it’s rather more luck-dependent than previous adventures, and could probably have had more playtesting and a little tweaking to hit the note. This is one of those adventures where players will find themselves honing a deck specifically to the case in hand, and may even then still fail because they cannot find an Athelas card, or too many Treachery cards appear in a bunch. If the luck of the draw is one of the things that put you off this Lord of the Rings card game, it might be worth skipping over this particular pack.